In macOS Mojave, Reduce transparency has broken logic and terrible design
I have motion issues, which I’ve written about on this blog before. I got sick from Mac OS X Lion and iOS 7, due to the animations Apple welded to them. Fortunately, the iOS team recognised the problems fairly quickly; the macOS team… less so, although the Mac did eventually get a Reduce motion control in the Display section of Accessibility.
Even so, I’ve long believed the Mac team doesn’t fully understand visual/balance accessibility issues, and isn’t good with details, and that opinion is rather upheld with Reduce transparency.
The standard macOS interface has quite a few semi-transparent elements, which like frosted glass provide a glimpse of what’s beneath them. At Apple events, execs go giddy about how pretty this is. In use, these elements vary from being distracting to outright dangerous. For example, if you have a motion-sickness issue and an animating web page is sitting behind a semi-transparent element, it can take a while before you realise it’s affecting you, by which time it’s too late and you’re already dizzy.
“Fine”, says Apple, grumpily, “so just turn on Reduce transparency”. Only it’s not that simple. Because when you do, Apple designers get in a strop and hurl logic out of the window. What you’d expect to happen is for macOS to remove the semi-transparent bits. So instead of Finder sidebars or the macOS app switcher showing what’s beneath them, they’d just have a neutral solid background. Nope. Instead, in its infinite wisdom, Apple’s decided those components should instead be coloured by your Desktop background.
This makes no logical sense. Why should the colour of an interface component be influenced by elements that may be several layers beneath them? Also, this decision can make interface elements less accessible, because you end up with an inconsistent interface (colours shifting as you move a window around the screen) and can impact on legibility (such as when moving a Finder window to the right on the default background, whereupon the sidebar goes a weird brown colour).
In tech circles, there’s the phrase ‘dogfooding’. This refers to ‘eating your own dog food’ – in other words, testing your own products in real-world usage. It feels like although Apple is happy to add accessibility controls to macOS, and regularly enthuses about such things relating to people who are blind, its internal teams need to down a whole lot more dog food regarding visual/balance elements. Apple prides itself on sweating the details when it comes to hardware; it needs to do the same with its system software too.
Update: 512 Pixels has created a gallery to illustrate the problem.
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Great points, I always turn off transparency and animations to reduce that weird dizzying feeling from motion everywhere (though I find it much worse in iOS) and also to improve performance where even my top-end MacBook Pro struggles to handle a bunch of transparent windows.
From a UI Accessibility standpoint though, transparency and animations are just the start of notable Accessibility issues on the Mac.
Then there’s the outlandishly thin and microscopic text sizes with ultra low contrast gray-on-gray text, which is everywhere across the interface elements from window title bars to sidebars to menu bars. I have normal vision and don’t wear corrective lenses but these aspects of the UI give me notable eye strain and fatigue that I never encountered before the modern redesign.
Why the Mac does not have better UI/UX font and text Accessibility options has been a mystery to me ever since they bludgeoned any and all contrast, readability, and depth out of the Mac interface since Yosemite. Interestingly, Apple realized the tiny thin fonts with low contrast was a UI design error way back when iOS 7 first visually overreached, and then they thankfully and quickly added a “Bold Text” setting and an “Adjust Text Size” slider as Accessibility choices, but both of those are still lacking on the Mac where it’s now needed more than ever before.
Will it ever be addressed, while the Mac still exists, or while the Mac is still relevant to pro users? What’s a computer? Right? Sigh.
Picking up on two of your points, two things baffle me about the Mac. The first is the manner in which grey on grey is becoming a thing again. I thought we’d beat that out of designers in the early 2000s. But also: typography. Why is the Mac’s default text editing layer not built on a beautiful typographic grid? Why don’t my emails look great by default rather than, well, crap?
Turning on “Increase contrast” in the same Settings Accessibility–>Display seems to fix the bleed-through problem, although the logic of that escapes me.
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